Pilgrim (36 page)
It may amuse Doctor Jung to know—should you ever be inclined to tell him of these events—that he himself took note of my visitors’ presence, since both Messagers, posing as man and newly wedded wife, were in the dining-room on the morning of our first extended encounter. He was, I could not fail to see, more than somewhat impressed with their ethereal beauty.
This is quite the right phrase. They were clearly not
of this world—though how would any mortal know this? What a great pity, for all our sakes, the gods and their minions do not appear more often.
Though my “life” has not by any means approached the extent of your own, you will recognize, I am sure, the mixture of joy and trepidation with which I allowed them to approach me. As you know too well, this is the accepted protocol:
one does not go to them
—
they come to you
. I did, however, make myself amply available, taking up a prominent place in the hotel lobby and making sure that I was paged by name.
I cannot tell how soon it was that I realized they had come to “call me home.” In the past, as I assume has been the case in your own experience, there was never any doubt one’s stay was to be extended. My own stay has not, as you know, been overly long. I have, so it now seems, been granted the average years of one human life—no more. I had a job to do—and it seems that job has come to an end. As I sit here now, I shrug at the thought of this—for how is one to know what it means? I suspect I shall never know—and must accept that.
You spoke to me once in the greatest confidence about these matters—and believe me, my dear, it remains a confidence never breached—saying that your encounters with the Others always took place in what you taught me to call the Grove. This was an honour accorded only once to me—and not, by any means, an honour I expected. But I will confess to you now that it was an honour I had hoped would be repeated many times, so long as you were in the world
to be there with me. In your bitterness, however, you explained that honour, once, as being
the honour of being dishonoured.
That you have suffered, I can bear witness. And to know that your suffering must continue is the greatest cause of my sorrow in being called away. But called I am.
That their name is
Messager
is almost amusing, they have so little tact in this. But they have been courteous otherwise and have treated me with complete respect. I was given a bouquet of freesia by Monsieur and a curtsey by Madame. Think of it! In that moment, I was royalty to them! They have that look, which you would recognize, of pristine champions—of athletes newly crowned with laurels—of youth as youth so rarely is, without the stamp of mortality—all breath and skin and clear-eyed wonder.
Dear one—to live—to die. What do we know? Nothing. Or perhaps, one thing.
To live is worse than to die.
To be rid—to be shed—to be done with life. Not to
have to
. Never again to
have to
get up at dawning—
be
—take responsibility—see what we see—know sadness—miss the presence of loved ones—touch and minister to dead infants, animals, strangers—never again to have to say
I can’t, but I will try. I cannot, but I shall.
To know what is expected of one, because one has eyes, ears and nerve ends—but never again to be placed in a position of having to say
I recognize
—
I see, I hear, I feel.
All these “human” qualities are about to pass from me, and while I rejoice in being able to shed
them, I cannot bear the knowledge that in shedding them I must be also shed of you.
Now, there is nothing I can do for you. Nothing.
Oh, God. Oh, gods. Oh, everyone.
To be thus helpless is already less than to be alive.
Our usefulness to one another has come, for whatever reason, to an end. And in this end, I recognize the need for my own demise.
My demise
. Yes. We must learn to practise the words for death.
Extinction. Quietude. Passing. Gone. Over. Final. Nothingness.
It is all so trite. So meaningless. I hope you are laughing. I am. Don’t you think it’s funny?
Je suis passée, monsieur. Life
itself is passé.
Laugh, Pilgrim, laugh. One of us has made it to the end. I did it all. I loved a mortal—gave birth to mortal children—suffered mortality in all its far-too-many manifestations. I listed myself amongst the most privileged of my time and place. I saw wrongs—and corrected them. I also failed to do so. I have been very—utterly—human. But still…
We all forgive ourselves, don’t we. We all forgive ourselves and blame some other—someone anonymous, but seen with such convenience from the corner of our eye. Always, when we need them, there is someone there to blame. But never self. Never, never self.
As death approaches me, I regret this most, Pilgrim—aside from my loss of you. I regret that I blamed, so often, others—for faults and problems of my own making. And, if not of my own making, certainly of my own tolerance. That men could not love
men—or women, women—that poverty was the fault and responsibility of the poverty-stricken (how can I have thought so!)—and that “good” was something that could be decreed by governments, as if by creating laws we could establish the boundaries of someone else’s needs and joys and confidence. How dare we decree what is “good” for others when for us it has been a gift!
I learned all this—so little!—in the moment I knew I was to be recalled. I learned that—aside from my experience of you, dear friend—I have barely lived at all. My love of Harry and of all my children—even my darkest love of David, whose predictable future is so ruinous to all my beliefs—was “merely human.” I had money, place and station. All the privileges, and took no advantage—except where you were concerned. Isn’t it odd—
or is it, one wonders
—that I should have missed so much within such a wide spectrum?
I think of so many—even of my own blessed children—of how often I failed to see them. Did not—could not—would not see them, while claiming to love them.
It is over. All of life. All of my opportunity. Once given, once missed—forever deprived. So wide a sweep. So narrow an experience. To have lived. To have been alive.
I am to be led into some valley, so I understand. A motor car will be involved. There will be snow. I know nothing else. And care not.
This one last thing remains to be said—and I have said it also to Doctor Jung in my final letter to him:
In
the wilderness, I found an altar with this inscription:
TO THE UNKNOWN GOD
…And I have made my sacrifice accordingly.
I know you will understand this, though Doctor Jung may not.
And now, I must say to you what you can never say to me.
Goodbye
.
My love to you, dare I say
always…
Sybil.
Jung, having read, folded the letter back into its envelope and, without remorse at having read it, placed it again in Anna’s music bag.
He sighed and sank farther back in his chair. Did all this signify that he was dealing not with one mental patient, but with two? And one of them, now dead.
The moment, of course, would come when he must show the letter to Pilgrim—but before that moment came, Jung knew, he would have to come to terms with the thought—if only the
thought
—that what he had just finished reading had been addressed to an immortal.
Friday, 30th November, 1900
Cheyne Walk
Word has reached me that Oscar Wilde died shortly after noon today in Paris. I wonder what the papers will make of this, if anything. They have been so meticulous in avoiding his name, they may well persist and print nothing. I thought of him this evening during my walk.
Emma stared at the page in fascination.
Oscar Wilde
. She remembered reading about his life—his trials and his death—when she was still a girl. She looked again at the date.
1900.
Three years before she and Carl Gustav were married.
She wondered what Mister Pilgrim would have to say about this infamous man. And about anyone else. She was still in a state of pleasant amazement that Carl Gustav had given her permission to take a look at the journals. And more than mere permission—it was an
assignment.
I must find out more about this man, Jung had said that morning at breakfast.
I must find out why he is writing these incredible stories
—
or whatever they are. Dreams
—
fables…I must find out what has happened in his life to prompt him to create these fantasies.
Emma’s assignment, then, was to browse through the journals looking for entries that dealt with Mister Pilgrim, himself—and with his life in London. Before that morning, her only experience of his writing had been to copy out that remarkable letter to Leonardo da Vinci. She remembered the tears falling onto the page as she wrote.
And now, before her for the first time, lay Mister Pilgrim’s own memories—of an evening walk in 1900, and of Oscar Wilde.
I had dined alone, though Agamemnon was at my feet as usual—dear little Aga, with all his snorts and sneezes. He has a cold, which I assume will pass. I think, somehow, he glories in it—barely waiting for the chill of winter before his snuffling begins. He knows it will bring him evenings with his basket by the fire and bowls of warm milk. Forster is very patient with him—constantly in danger of tripping over him because the dog delights in choosing hallway shadows for his daytime naps.
Dinner consisted of consommé heavily laced with sherry—a fillet of sole in a delicious sauce—a roast of beef
au jus
—Brussels sprouts (
al dente,
which I enjoy) and duchess potatoes. This was followed by a rice pudding, which contained the fattest, sweetest raisins I’ve had in years. And a bottle of
Nuits-St-Georges
. Superb. I must remember to speak with Mrs Matheson and congratulate her. Her way with sweets
and sauces is particularly good and the joint was cooked to perfection.
As I reached the front hall and had my walking stick in hand, poor little Aga pretended he would like to come with me—thinking, I suppose, it was his duty to walk me. But he hung back close to Forster and the minute I turned away towards the door, I heard him dash back into the library and his basket.
I never cross the river. Consequently, three directions only are open to me. Will I ever tire of this? I doubt it. Each direction offers its own delights and mysteries. My game of making up the lives beyond the windows I pass is sufficiently intriguing to entertain me, should I have nothing else on my mind. Besides which, there are real lives beyond the windows with which I am all too familiar, and—depending on the moment—I praise or damn them, throwing a mental bouquet or brick at the glass before I go my way. (Later, coming to Whistler’s house—even though he no longer lives there—I cursed him out loud for Oscar’s sake and threw a ton of bricks. The brute.)
I went up Cheyne Row and over then to Oakley Street and back to Cheyne Walk and up again on Flood—and, turning right, along Saint Leonard’s Terrace until I came to Tedworth Square. I often create a maze this way of ups and downs. I suppose it’s a kind of game. To be lost, I sometimes think, would be wonderful.
Where am I, now?
And then the joy of finding home again, as if by chance. To be lost. To be lost. And no one knowing who I am.
London seems, these years, to be impossibly safe
and civilized. Nothing visible requires the eye to look away, and the advent of the coming century, with all its predicted wonders lends a kind of security, much as to say:
we are safely harboured here and nothing can harm us now.
Except…
This morning, in the dark at 6:00 a.m., I had another of these dreams that have been plaguing me of late and I woke, cold-sweated—fumbling for the lamp. I nearly knocked it over, but managed to catch it in time. In the drawer beside me, I found my notebook with its pen. My fingers were shaking so, I could barely get them to function. Once I had managed to pull myself together, I began the transcript of what had passed in the dream—but still, as with the others, I have no idea what it means. The word, this time, was
Menin
. I now have three of these in a column, each name spoken, as at Delphi, through a wreath of fire and smoke.
Arras.
Saint Quentin.
And, today: Menin.
And the phrase
there are only pine trees, now, because nothing else will grow here any more.
What can it mean, I wonder. Of all these names I know only one:
Arras
—a place in France. Of the saints, I have too little knowledge, though I presume that
Quentin
is French. And who might
Menin
be? A kind of feeble joke occurs to me: that Menin and Saint Quentin, like Polonius, are in behind the Arras about to be killed. But by whom? Not Hamlet, surely.
Hamlet has never played a role in my dreams. Nor anyone theatrical—barring that one occasion when Sarah Bernhardt went beneath the guillotine wrong way round and lost her legs. It was because she insisted on giving one of her speeches from
L’Aiglon
all the way to the end. In the dream, they fed her to the knife in sections. Her lips went on moving, even after her head was severed. Dreadful—though amusing. I recall that I thought, on waking:
well, this is what all great artists have in common
—
persistence.
As to the pine trees, I have no explanation. This image, too, is one of a “set,” or sequence. Four days ago I dreamt of a landscape over which an unfamiliar river went into flood because its weirs and dams were clogged with dead animals—sheep and horses, cattle and so forth. And a week ago, some figures dressed in ancient armour—iron helmets, masks and breastplates—moved across an unidentified hill, dispensing fire from what appeared to be garden hoses. Everything in their path was laid to waste.